My liberal friends think they are smart because they think they understand the science used to justify lockdown measures, masking ordinances and vaccine mandates. They send me vapid little articles that dress government propaganda up with liberal guilt-tripping, insultingly sleazy arguments, and slanderous vilification of the opposition. These articles only make me wonder why they found them convincing in the first place, but for some reason it makes some people feel better to pretend like they know what is going on, no matter how ridiculous the explanation they believe.
In fact, none of the pandemic response measures make any sense from a scientific public health perspective. Quarantines, masking and social distancing have done orders of magnitude more harm than Covid-19. Covid vaccines kill far more people than they save, and the psychological harm of social isolation has driven people to the brink of madness. The “science” used to justify those measures was all bullshit. None of it ever made any sense from a public health perspective, and none of it calculated, let alone considered the side-effects.
On the other hand, from a global fascist coup perspective, the pandemic response was ruthlessly shrewd, and worked flawlessly to prevent people all over the world from opposing the overthrow of their elected governments and an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the middle-class, to the obscenely rich. From the perspective of a global technocratic takeover, the dissolution of representative democracy, and the abolition of civil rights, the pandemic response proved brilliant, perhaps the greatest single political achievement of any fascist regime ever.
Think about it. You just witnessed a global fascist coup, and instead of opposing it, you placed yourself under house arrest, did your level best to censor and bully your less gullible friends and neighbors, and then lined up for mass execution. They took over the whole world without firing a single bullet, and you cheered for them, took your shot, and turned on your friends who didn’t. That’s what just happened folks. None of it made sense, scientifically. None of it was necessary, and none of it was about protecting you. Quite the opposite.
So no, I’m not impressed by what you think you know about virology or medicine, even if you are a doctor. Most doctors don’t know much outside of their own narrow specialty, except that they will lose their license if they don’t repeat exactly what the AMA tells them to say. The doctors who specialize in treating people with Covid, and care more about their patients than their income, like Dr Peter McCollough, tell us that masks are useless, Covid vaccines kill people, and early treatment saves lives. Vaccine specialists like Dr. Robert Malone, who invented mRNA vaccines tell us these Covid shots are dangerous in both the short and long-term. Epidemiologists like Dr John Ioannidis tell us that quarantines killed far more people than the virus.
You don’t have to be a doctor to understand what just happened, because it was never about science, medicine or public health. This was all about stealth, deception and power. Billionaires used technology and information as weapons against the people of the world in a global fascist coup. As a result, the world’s power structure has changed, and the United States has been reduced to a banana republic. If you don’t recognize the political reality of what just happened, and you are not outraged, you an idiot, and if you don’t do something about it you are a coward. That’s my scientific analysis of our current predicament.
I used to think that liberals and progressives were smarter than Trump supporters. Not anymore. Today, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, everyone looks like a chump to me, because we got chumped big-time. Today, Trump and his little insurrection just looks like a diversion, while liberals, progressives, and Democrats in general now look like the American equivalent of “Good Germans.”
I realize that to most of you, civil rights means you can fuck whoever you want, use whichever restroom you want, and get an abortion whenever you need one, but civil rights, like the right to freely assemble, practice your religion, enjoy privacy in your own person and home, travel freely, and speak freely in public, these rights aren’t just nice to have, they are essential if “We the People” are to have agency over our own lives, or any influence over how we are governed. As long as those rights remain abridged or revoked, “We the People” are locked-out of our own government, and our lives are not our own.
I know they have couched this coup in medical bullshit, but we got chumped. Masks and social distancing don’t really do that much to stop the spread of virus, as we’ve seen, but they stop democracy dead in its tracks. Most of us are really not that vulnerable to the Covid virus, but the measures we have taken to avoid the virus have crippled us, and made us extremely vulnerable to fascism, which is terminal for a nation.
Frankly, I’m no fan of our democracy. It has never worked, and I don’t expect it to start working any time soon, but I do love my freedom, and I believe in the power of people coming together, forming groups, and working together in groups. Personal freedom, and the freedom to interact with whom you choose wherever you choose are essential to the function of any civil society, and they are our birthright. Giving these rights away, for a false promise of deliverance from an exaggerated threat is shameful, and if we fail to reclaim those rights immediately, history, not to mention our own children, will forever brand us with this shame.
I have learned in my life, that there are two ways of securing your freedom:
1. You can be quiet and sneaky, and probably get away with what you want to do, even though it is prohibited, while your neighbors suffer the oppression.
2. You can stand with your neighbor against the oppressor so that you can all enjoy the freedom you deserve and need.
The problem with Option 2 is that your neighbor has to stand with you. Most people will not make a stand like that unless they know they have their back against the wall, and they can find no other escape. I don’t think my neighbors realize just how badly we’ve been chumped, or how grave our situation really is. We’re still congratulating ourselves for keeping Trump from a second term, but things are so much worse now. I wish Trump were the problem, or that it was just a virus, I really do.
I don’t care which pole you gravitate to. We all got chumped, and unless we understand what really happened, we cannot respond to it effectively. So before you start talking down to me, and reciting the same lies we’ve all heard a million times from every single corporately owned media outlet in America as well as NPR and PBS, just check out these documentaries.
Lets start with Catherine Austin Fitts. I used to really enjoy hearing her when she was a guest on Harry Shearer’s LeShow. He had her on to explain the Mortgage Meltdown and Bank Bailout of 2008-9. She knows banking and financial markets and she is really good at explaining them to lay people. This has nothing to do with medicine and no one disputes any of this information, but it has everything to do with what happened to our country, and the world.
I first heard media critic Marc Crispin Miller on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! In this interview, he explains how the media polarized the electorate and used this polarization to manipulate Americans into abandoning their civil rights and complying with strict authoritarian social controls.
Dr Michael Yeadon used to be VP in charge of research into new drugs at Pfizer. He has a long professional history in new drug development. He has very grave concerns about these new “vaccines” as well as the pandemic response measures. You should consider them carefully.
Finally, If you’ve read my recent posts, you may recall that I told you a little about Tony “Lab Leak” Fauci. Well, Robert F Kennedy Jr has a new book about Fauci coming out in a couple of months. In this speech he talks about his new book, and how we got to where we are now. I hope you’ll watch it.
Ok, if you’ve watched all of those, and you still want to talk down to me and recite the popular lies, go ahead, but I assure you, I’ve heard them all before. Honestly, do you think I have difficulty following the official narrative? Or that if I didn’t believe it when I heard it on NPR, it will sound more convincing coming out of your mouth, or in your comment? My question to you is: Do you really believe that story? Because if you do, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. On the other hand if the gravity of this situation disturbs you, and you want to talk about it, I’d love to hear from you.
This past Tuesday, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors took up the topic of whether or not to declare a shelter crisis in Humboldt County. At least 20 people came, mostly from the HSU Homeless Students Alliance to ask the Supervisors to recognize the well established fact that Humboldt County does not have nearly enough housing to accommodate its residents and workforce, and that emergency measures should be taken to address this problem.
The HSA is just the latest group to ask the Board of Supervisors to make this declaration. Concerned citizens and organized groups like AHHA have been pressing the county about this for years. The Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, after listening to dozens of hours of public testimony on the subject, has recommended that the Board of Supervisors declare a shelter crisis multiple times. The Board of Supervisors has repeatedly ignored them all.
The Board of supervisors didn’t have any problem taking swift and decisive action to address homelessness, when they thought they could do it by passing radical, draconian, and unconstitutional laws designed to criminalize poverty. Clearly the problem was serious enough that they thought it warranted infringing on all of our constitutional rights, but, alas, this punitive approach failed miserably, yet again.
When this policy of unbridled police state fascism failed, the county jumped on the “Mormon Miracle” called “Housing First,” but even the Housing First consultants, who the taxpayers pay to advise our Board of Supervisors, have told them that there isn’t enough housing in Humboldt County to make Housing First very effective. In reality, all Housing First does in Humboldt County is take housing away from working families, and give it to disabled individuals. We need housing for working families, and for disabled people, and we need it all to be affordable.
We have well established organizations with plans and working models, all home-grown, designed to solve our housing problem here in Humboldt County by creating affordable housing that works for the people who need it. They have made dozens of presentations and attended hundreds of meetings about it. This past Tuesday’s BOS meeting was just the latest. What did the Board of Supervisors decide to do about this serious problem at Tuesday’s meeting? They decided to form an ad hoc committee, which allows them to waste everyone’s time and money for another couple of years without doing anything constructive.
If they could have solved this problem by punishing people, this problem would have been solved years ago. We love to punish people here in Humboldt County, and our Board of Supervisors will eagerly implement our most sadistic impulses and write them into law, but we really hate to do anything that makes life easier on people. Most of us are too small-minded to see beyond our own petty resentments, insecurities and greed, and too well programmed by corporate propaganda to think for ourselves. We don’t mind working two low-wage jobs, just to pay the rent, so long as the people who don’t work that hard, sleep out in the rain. We’re literally just that stupid.
Even without a significant racial divide, Humboldt County gives Mississippi a run for the money in the field of bitter small-minded hatefulness. Honestly, I have never heard hatred and bigotry expressed more openly and frequently, against anyone, anywhere, in all my life as I hear it here in Humboldt County, against the poor and homeless. It is, by far, the ugliest thing about Humboldt County, and all of the media outlets here pander to that ugliness and promote it. It’s shameful.
Unfortunately, the American Genocide, extractive industries, and the War on Drugs have brought out the worst in people here in Humboldt County, and attracted the worst kind of people to Humboldt County for longer that anyone can remember. It shows. It shows in ugly attitudes, bitter resentment, and heartless insensitivity to the suffering of others.
We’re not getting anywhere by reasoning with these people. For them, reason is just a tool for getting their own way. They’ll say anything. Lying is second nature to them, and lying to themselves is first. They’ll make sure that the new ad hoc committee on homelessness does nothing but waste time and money for another year or two, while dozens of people die needlessly on the streets of Humboldt County.
We should stop wasting our time with them. Instead, I think we need to take a more revolutionary approach to homelessness. Instead of appealing to the better nature of people who clearly have no better nature, we should focus directly on providing the needy with the tools they need to secure for themselves, a home, and a brighter future here in Humboldt County.
Instead of appealing to the rich and insensitive to come together as a community, we should arm the poor and oppressed to enable their liberation. For $200 we can put a quality firearm in the hands of a needy homeless man. For $1 we can put a bullet in that gun. With a gun and some bullets, we can give homeless people the tools they need to claim their rightful home here in Humboldt County, the same way early settlers did when they first discovered this beautiful place. That is, by killing, and enslaving the people who already live here.
A lot of our homeless Vets have military training. Providing them with guns and ammunition would give them the opportunity to put that training to use here in the US, and they could train other homeless people how to work together to launch successful tactical assaults. Together, they could overcome any obstacle and rise above their current economic condition, even without the support of Humboldt County’s “Old Guard” or new rich.
Every cop we hire here in Humboldt County costs the taxpayers more than $100,000 a year, and hiring more cops has completely failed to address the problem of homelessness in Humboldt County. The Kevlar vests and semi-automatic weapons our cops carry cost a pittance by comparison. We could save a lot of money, and solve the problem of homelessness once and for all, if instead of hiring cops, we just gave the guns, ammunition and armor to to the people in the street who need them to secure their little piece of Humboldt County and participate in this proud Humboldt County tradition.
Even if we can’t raise the money locally, I’ll bet we can find foreign governments who would be happy to help us out. I know this isn’t a new idea, but I don’t think it has ever been given a fighting chance to succeed in the US before. We could be pioneers here in Humboldt County, with this new approach to solving the problem of poverty and homelessness. They’ll call it the Humboldt Revolution, and it will change the way the world sees poverty in America. It’s got to start somewhere. Why not here?
I’ve been taking a break from “the News” lately, pretty much since the election. It just got too embarrassing to watch. Trump turned US politics into a reality TV show, and I’m only willing to dumb down so far. I figure that if anything important happens, someone will tell me. I have that trust because people tell me about it even when nothing important happens. It really surprises me how much people talk about national politics around here.
I mean, my dope yuppie friends have no respect for the law, and don’t pay income tax, but somehow feel invested in American democracy, and talk about it all the time. My homeless friends, on the other hand, suffer human and civil rights violations every day, get treated like second-class citizens, and endure daily harassment from law enforcement, but they are outraged that Russian hackers compromised the legitimacy of “our elections.” “The News” does this to people.
“The News” is the one thing that truly unites us as a nation. We learn to ignore our own reality in order to digest, internalize and regurgitate this unified national narrative we call “the News.” We have news 24/7/365 so that you never have to think about your own life. “The News” is always there for you, telling you what’s important, what you should think about, and how you should think about it, and because we follow “the News” so faithfully, “the News” defines our national debate, and sets our national agenda. By paying such close attention to “the News,” instead of what’s going on around us, we allow the media, corporate interests and lawmakers to ignore our reality as well.
Doesn’t it seem strange that “the News” gives you updates on all of the major stock indices, every half-hour at least, even though most of us don’t own stocks, and if we do, they are managed by someone else, in a 401K, mutual fund, or retirement account, so the information is not that relevant to that many people. On the other hand, why don’t we have up-to-date stats that tell us about our general well-being as a community. Why don’t they tell us, at 8:00am every morning, how many people slept outside that night? Tell us how many people had nothing to eat yesterday. Show us how people make ends meet. Why would anyone care whether the stock market was going up, if these indices keep sliding?
Instead, we let “the News” tell us how many people we have to throw overboard to buoy the economy, as gauged by the stock market. “The News” tells us why we should expect to lose our home if we get sick, and “the News” tells us why we should sacrifice our children to protect the investments of billionaires, but now “the News” has gone too far.
Today, “The News” is telling us to pay attention to Donald Trump. This goes beyond selling the American people on ridiculous ideas that work against their own interests. Paying attention to Trump amounts to stupidity for stupidity’s sake. Paying attention to Trump is like reading The Enquirer. You know that it is a waste of time, and that you are not learning anything, and that it won’t do any good to point out the inconsistencies in their stories, because telling the truth has never mattered to either of them. Why waste your life that way?
From my perspective, as a writer, “the News” helps me gauge what I can assume my readers know, and what rhetoric they are familiar with, but I don’t want to think about that anymore. I don’t want to know how dumb people have gotten these days, and listening to Trump isn’t going to make them any smarter. I thought a Trump presidency would be a goldmine for political satire, at least, but I don’t find Trump very funny at all. Satirizing Trump is like trying to satirize pro-wrestling. How do you make fun of someone who already makes a mockery of the office?
In many ways, Trump is already the perfect satirical president. He’s got the ego, the chauvinism, the poor taste and the obnoxiousness that everyone despises about America and Americans. He treats other people the way the US treats other countries, and he’s fat, ugly and vain, just like most Americans.
He’s really the perfect president because he so completely embodies what the United States stands for. When you realize that, you begin to understand that our problems are much deeper than our current president, and you won’t find the answers to them on “the News.”
Besides, we’ve got plenty of corrupt, greedy fascists right here in Humboldt County. Here, we talk about the Fascist in Chief, in Mara Lago, chiefly because we don’t want to talk about all of the sleazy shit that goes on around here. In that sense, talking about Trump is kind of like talking about the weather. Trump is what you talk about when you don’t want to talk about anything. Mostly, people don’t want to talk about anything, because that would require them to think about something, formulate an opinion about it, and invest enough of themselves in that opinion to state it out loud. I’m not sure that people have it in them anymore.
Nobody wants to talk about the housing crisis. Nobody wants to talk about the dead bodies and the missing people, the violent crime, the opiate crisis, the Hep-C epidemic, the human rights abuses and institutional violence going on right here in Humboldt County, stuff we could actually do something about Nobody wants to talk about those things because nobody wants to think about those things, because mostly, they’re too busy scheming their own next crime against humanity. Instead, they tell me what Trump did, because they saw it on “the News.”
Finally, we have elected a president who has what it takes to make the United States live up to it’s full potential. Trump understands this country. He knows how it works, and he knows how to make it work for him. Now that the American people have placed it in his tiny hands, he’ll show the world what it can do.
Every cent you paid in taxes, every vote you ever cast, every letter you ever wrote to your congressman, every dollar you donated and every ounce of enthusiasm you devoted to any political campaign here in the US, ultimately coalesced into the perfect opportunity for someone exactly like Trump. This is the US we created, and Trump is exactly the kind of guy we created it for.
Most of the world already thinks of the US as “the Evil Empire,” but apparently it takes someone like Trump to demonstrate it to us here at home. I think we should make the most of this “teachable moment” so that we all understand how we got here, because, in the eventuality that we survive this debacle, we should make sure that we never let this kind of thing ever happen again.
Today, Trump’s victory seems impossible to comprehend. It is a fact that doesn’t mesh with our world-view. I didn’t vote for Trump, and I’m not lying to you about Trump’s victory, it’s just a fact of life that seems incomprehensible at the moment. If we want to disarm Trump, or prevent the rise of future Trumps, we need to understand how and why Trump happened in the first place.
First, let’s talk about how our world-view got so far removed from reality. Very few of us live in reality anymore. Instead, we spend most of our time online, at work, or parked in front of a glowing screen of one sort or another. While reality remains full of mystery, we increasingly inhabit simplified, man-made environments like the internet, indoor spaces and modern cities. We design these simplified environments to serve us, and so they tend to reinforce our cultural habits and thought patterns.
Reality, on the other hand, constantly challenges us, it presents unexpected circumstances, curious facts, and only gets more interesting the more you look at it. Reality demands creativity, and encourages us to think. Simplified man-made environments, on the other hand, are insufferably boring by comparison, which is why we consume a torrent of man-made entertainment and decoration to fill them.
Even with a million channels, and ten trillion websites, however, the man-made environments we inhabit do not challenge our minds nearly as much as reality. Over time, our minds adjust to these simplified environments, as we become familiar with, dependent on and even jaded to, the intellectual habits of our cultural architects. To us, it feels as though we understand how the world works, when in fact, we’ve simply lost touch with reality.
Simplified environments make us simple-minded. Most of us first lost touch with reality in that simplified man-made environment we call “school.” We learned about democracy in school, and somehow, they taught us the history of this nation in a way that made us proud of it, which is no small task when you think about it. They made us simple-minded in school, and they programmed us all with simple ideas about how the world works, and about what the United States is. We believed them, because they were the experts and because we were stuck in school, and eager to go home and watch television.
Pretty much everything we know about reality comes from teachers and media, and that is also true for teachers, and media people. We have become a nation of simpletons, with a paucity of ideas, and reality is entirely too much for us now. I cannot stress the importance of this factor enough. It effects the ability of American voters to comprehend their situation, and make a decision, and it effects our ability to understand the outcome of the election.
We just watched a billionaire egomaniac ascend to the presidency through a mixture of misogyny, racism and saber-rattling. That’s not supposed to happen. Democracy, and the free press were supposed to prevent that from happening. That’s what they taught us in school, anyway.
Tell me how much you believe in democracy now. Tell me how much you believe in the justice of the Supreme Court. Tell me how much you believe in the American Experiment. It doesn’t matter if this is the best form of government that humanity has yet devised. I don’t care how much you cherish the Constitution, the system has failed. We have created a monster.
Today, it seems obvious, but the system was not designed to serve us, and it never has. The system gave us genocide. The system gave us slavery. The system gave us two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The system gave us the War on Drugs. The system gave us homelessness, and the system brought us to the brink of global ecosystem collapse. We didn’t ask for those things. Those things didn’t happen while the system was busy serving us; the system used us to accomplish those important goals.
The system’s number one purpose is to serve the interests of trans-national capital. Right now, it is strongly in the interest of trans-national capital, that the US sign on to these secretly negotiated, top-secret trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. These trade deals relinquish US sovereignty over issues that matter to the American people, like the environment, and tariffs, that can broadly effect jobs, wages and consumer prices, to shadowy multinational entities who answer to no one, but have their own laws and their own courts.
Both major parties had popular candidates who strongly resonated with the American people on this issue, and both parties treated these candidates as outsiders, and tried to sabotage their campaigns. The Democrats eventually tamed Bernie, but the Republicans could not stop Trump. The system failed. The system failed to manufacture consent. Now, a rogue has taken the reigns of the mightiest force for violence and destruction the world has ever known,because the American people have had enough of the system.
In many ways, Trump’s victory really is a victory for the American people. The people have spoken, and they have defied the system. They got behind a populist outsider candidate, and wrenched the awesome power of the United States government from the clutches of multinational capital. Unfortunately, they just handed it to an arrogant, bigoted, impulsive egomaniac whose promise to “make America great again” terrifies most of us.
The world just got more dangerous, and more unpredictable, and we are no longer intellectually equipped to handle reality. How does it feel to be a part of Donald Trump’s new toy?
It’s open season on the poor and homeless in Southern Humboldt. Vigilante gangs terrorize them on the streets. Cops abuse them and local merchants harass them for not looking prosperous enough to patronize their overpriced ripoff businesses. Now the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors intends to pass a new ordinance designed to punish this oppressed population still further, while it chokes out our civil rights and strangles the democratic process to boot. The so-called “aggressive panhandling” or “aggressive solicitation” ordinance will make it a crime to ask for help in Humboldt County.
Under this proposed ordinance, a person who had just been robbed, stabbed, beaten and left laying on the sidewalk screaming for help, could be cited for “aggressive solicitation.” This ordinance could stop Ray Oakes from asking the “Question of the Week” for the Humboldt Independent, and this ordinance could certainly be used to prevent effective grassroots organizing. Unions would have never gotten started without “aggressive solicitation.” It takes a whole lot of “aggressive solicitation” to get any grassroots political movement off the ground, and here in America we have whole religions dedicated to “aggressive solicitation.”
Here in the USA, we decided, almost 250 years ago, that we prefer “aggressive solicitation” to violence, deceit and treachery, which had long been the custom in Europe, and it was the proud American tradition of “aggressive solicitation” established by such patriots as Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and Paul Revere that made this country a beacon for freedom and democracy. More than a civil right, the right to “aggressively solicit” is a human right, and a birthright. In fact, “aggressive solicitation” is the only thing we know how to do, instinctively, from birth.
Without “aggressive solicitation” we would not survive as a species, and “aggressive solicitation” has an important function within the community, as well as the family. It makes no more sense to prohibit “aggressive solicitation” within the community, than it does to punish a baby for crying in the house. If your baby won’t stop crying, you don’t punish the baby, you feed the baby. “Aggressive solicitation” is a signal, and we ignore it, or worse, prohibit it, at our own peril.
In another era, both past and perhaps future, with more enlightened judges, the Supreme Court would almost certainly shoot down any ordinance resembling the one the Supes currently consider, but thanks to the Scalia Court, the court that handed down “Citizens United” and declared that money is protected speech and corporations are citizens, they could probably get away with it. Who knows how constitutional this proposed ordinance, or the one Eureka and Fortuna passed, will look next year?
I did a lot of political work back in the ’90s, to legalize marijuana, and to close nuclear power plants. We would never have been able sustain those movements without a significant amount of “aggressive solicitation.” I know, because I did it. I could get a complete stranger to write me a check for $100 in two minutes.
I didn’t just approach pedestrians, or stand on street corners, malls, parks and other public spaces, although I did plenty of that too. I went even further. I raised a lot of money for a number of organizations by wandering through neighborhoods where I didn’t know anyone, onto private property, and knocking on complete strangers’ front doors. I knocked on about 50 doors every night. That’s “aggressive solicitation” no matter how you look at it. Lots of people called the cops on me.
At the time, what I did was considered constitutionally protected free speech. We had a legal department, and when we didn’t have a legal department, we had the ACLU. Occasionally, some little uptight burg would pass an ordinance like the one the Supes are now considering, and liberal New England lawyers would swarm them like hornets, and they’d never do it again. We won every time.
Around here, non-profit groups seem to rely more on alcohol sales and parties to fund their campaigns, than the kind of direct grassroots fund-raising that I did. I doubt any of them will recognize the threat this proposed ordinance poses, or stand up for their right to become politically relevant one day. The poor and homeless don’t have a legal team to defend their rights, and the general public has no idea what it takes to organize a grassroots movement, and I doubt many of them even care.. It seems most people in Humboldt County prefer violence, deceit and treachery to democracy anyways.
But here’s the kicker. I have, never once, been “aggressively solicited” by anyone in Humboldt County. I don’t spend a lot of time in Garberville, but I usually walk from the library at the North end of town, to the thrift stores on the South side of town, right through the Garberville shopping district,, at least once or twice a week. I’ve usually got a buck for anyone who asks, but hardly ever does anyone ask. When they do ask, people usually ask very timidly, and often I can barely hear them.
Even in Eureka and Arcata, I get “spanged” every once in a while. Usually by the fourth ask, I’m tapped out, but I can’t remember the last time four people asked me for spare change on the same day, anywhere in Humboldt County. Does that really constitute a problem? Once, years ago, I got hustled for $20, by the kid who used to own Nacho Mamma, when I saw him a few years later, in the parking lot of Eureka Natural Foods. Honestly, I was glad to see that at least someone around here had it together enough to concoct an effective rap, and I knew the guy. If he told me he needed $20, for anything, I’d have given it to him, once.
I don’t think we have a problem with “aggressive solicitation,” so much as we have a problem with “aggressive fascism.” We have a craven cadre of drug dealers, real-estate developers and merchants pulling the strings of our elected officials to invent new laws that criminalize poverty and stifle dissent. They all want to skim the economic cream from the injustice of the War on Drugs, while they criminalize the poverty the War on Drugs creates in this community. Does it get any uglier, greedier or more corrupt than that? No, I don’t think we have a problem with “aggressive solicitation” at all. We have a much bigger problem than that, and it’s going to take a lot of “aggressive solicitation” to solve it.
I wrote the following Letter to the Editor about my favorite blackberry patch in the Southern Humboldt Community Park. It appeared in this week’s issue of The Independent and The Redwood Times. I’m sure it will not make me any more popular.
Dear Editor,
One thing I really love about August in SoHum is blackberries. I don’t mind the thorns. I don’t mind the scratches, or the purple stains on my hands and clothes. I just love the taste of fresh ripe blackberries, and I can’t get enough of them.
I know that Himalayan blackberries are an invasive species around here, but frankly, so am I, so we have that in common. I take inspiration from those thorny, fast-growing vines. I, like the noble blackberry, have taken root here. I can be a sweet and generous friend, but those who cross me, will find me a thorny and resilient adversary.
As you can imagine, I was not thrilled to see a new sign in front of my favorite blackberry patch announcing the future site of ball fields at the Community Park. I know that a lot of people like baseball and soccer, but sports fans can be a pretty obnoxious bunch. All over this country, sports fans have prevailed on local governments to force taxpayers to subsidize the conversion of prime real estate into grand arenas for the benefit of people who refuse to outgrow their insane obsession with stupid children’s games.
These sports complexes never turn out to benefit taxpayers. As a result, critical infrastructure, like roads, bridges and sewers, as well as social services for the needy get neglected, so that sports fans have someplace to drink overpriced beer, and a team of overpaid steroid abusers to hurl insults at, while contractors and developers quietly pocket huge sums of public money.
You might say of sports “It’s only a game.” but it’s worse than that. It’s a racket. It’s a diversion, and it’s a tool of oppression used by fascist governments everywhere. No, there’s nothing innocent or wholesome about organized sports at any level. Sports are a racket because they funnel public dollars into the pockets of private contractors and developers without providing any real benefit to the community. Sports are a diversion because they shift people’s focus away from real issues, struggles and movements and onto staged competitions of no significance whatsoever, and sports are a tool of fascist oppression because they separate young people by by age and gender and pit them against each other while adult coaches propagandize them and encourage them to control, dominate, and defeat their opponents.
Wilhelm Reich wrote eloquently about the role of organized sports in developing a fascist society.
Reich felt strongly, that to defeat global fascism, it was crucial to eliminate organized sports, because organized sports sow the seeds of military fascism.
I encourage everyone to read Reich’s book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism before they decide to support sports programs based on fond memories of their youth, or the infectiously cute image of boys in their Little League uniforms.
I know, from listening to Community Park board member Dennis Huber’s KMUD radio show, Monday Morning Magazine, that Dennis has fond memories of his days as a baseball player, and that he’s very keen to see the blackberry bushes at the park removed and replaced with a synthetic, AstroTurf covered ball field.
AstroTurf causes more sports injuries than grass
For every child who grows up with fond memories of organized sports, there is another child who has been traumatized, seriously injured or simply suffered through the ordeal, when they would have rather done something else. By artificially inflating the importance of sports, we encourage competition, gender bias and hierarchy in young people, and discourage creativity, cooperation and imaginative play.
I think it’s important to “be the change we wish to see in the world”. Even Dennis Huber gives lip-service to this idea when he talks about building a sustainable culture, and says, “let it begin here” at the end of each of his radio shows. Well, in order to build a sustainable culture, we have to actually change the way we do things. Isn’t it time this community stopped perpetuating fascist indoctrination through organized sports, and instead showed respect for the natural bounty, beauty and community benefit that wild blackberries provide.
Hundreds of local community members derive sustenance and succor from the delicious blackberries that grow wild at the Community Park. These blackberries also feed a variety of birds, from wild turkeys, to sparrows, finches and wrens, and provide habitat and food for mammals like deer, bears and bush bunnies. Young people love to pick blackberries, and picking blackberries teaches them a lot about the natural world and their relationship to it.
Organized sports, on the other hand, drain community resources, line the pockets of contractors and developers, and instill fascist attitudes and ideas in young people that, once established, become even harder to uproot than blackberry vines. Organized sports serve the interests of fascism and promote a culture of domination, oppression and corruption, which judging by the actions of the Community Park Board, remains alive and well here in So Hum.
Now, I could make fun of the republican presidential candidates, like everybody else, but I’ve got bigger Twinkies to flambe. If you don’t already know that the republicans are hell-bent to destroy the planet and enslave us all, you are too dumb for words, too dumb for my words at least.
Don’t get me wrong, the democrats will destroy the planet and enslave us all too, but to them, its just a job. That’s your choice, as I see it. You can vote for fanatical fascists, or you can vote for professional fascists, or you can throw your vote away, and vote for a third-party fascist. Any way you slice it, it comes up fascist.
I don’t mean that the US has become a fascist state recently, or since the Bush years, or even the Reagan years. I mean, since it’s inception. The US was founded as a fascist state, has always functioned as a fascist state, and will continue to function as a fascist state, as long as it continues to function at all.
That’s what the founding fathers had in mind. That’s why the Supreme Court decided “US vs. Citizen’s United” the way they did.
The founding fathers intended for this country to be run by the people who own it. The founding fathers didn’t think that women should have the vote. The founding fathers didn’t think Indians deserved the right to vote. The founding fathers didn’t think slaves deserved the right to vote. They didn’t even think that slaves deserved 3/5 of a vote. They thought slave-owners deserved an extra 3/5 of a vote for every slave they owned.
When they said “All men are created equal”, they meant that they no longer believed that royal genealogy, or divine rights made people better leaders. They decided that they, the land-owning business-class, should have exclusive control of government. That’s why we have the separation of church and state.
When the business-class has exclusive control of the government, that’s called fascism. The founding fathers invented it, here in the US, and it is their great contribution to the progress of civilization. Where kings, popes and pharaohs ruled with divine authority, turning to God for advice on controlling the masses, our founding fathers decided that the unruly masses could be managed more profitably by those who had proven themselves most successful at it in business.
Those successful businessmen, rather than treat the masses as royal subjects, instead, treat us as customers. A businessman needs to know his customer. A businessman needs to know his customer’s likes and dislikes, needs and desires, and his strengths and weaknesses, so the businessman can devise effective ways to convince, confuse or coerce his customer into buying his product.
That’s why we have elections. We have elections to prove that they can still sell us fascism, and that we’re still buying it. As long as it comes labeled “Democracy”, and we have two competing brands to choose from, we still listen to the moronic debates, the endless horse-race media coverage and flock to the polls in droves to vote for the same people who have been screwing us all along.
I’ve spent enough time working in liberal/lefty, non-profits to know that at the bleeding heart of every liberal lies the stone-cold calculating mind of a fascist. While right wingers favor fascism by Bible and business, hippies prefer a fascism of party and positivity. Right wingers tend to flourish in government positions, where they form “good ol’ boy” networks. “Hippie Hitlers” prefer to work in the non-profit realm. Either way, you get oppression, incompetence and corruption from both sides of the aisle.
I’ve seen “Hippie Hitlers” of one degree or another in nearly every non-profit I’ve been involved with, but Humboldt seems to have more than its fair share, and they really seem to flourish here. “Hippie Hitlers” feed on liberal guilt. We have a lot of guilty liberals here in Humboldt Co., and some of them have a lot of untraceable cash. That might explain the swarm of “Hippie Hitlers” around here.
But how does “Hippie Hitler” use “party and positivity” to acquire and wield power over our local non-profits. How does, for example, a concert promoter convince a small town to build and maintain a huge concert hall, with a top-notch sound system, that primarily benefits concert promoters? I acknowledge that Carol Bruno did many great things for this community (Hitler built the autobahn too). However, Carol Bruno provides a stark, and well documented example of “Hippie Hitler” in action in Humboldt Co. non-profits.
First, the “power of positivity”. Folks around here recall that during the reggae wars, Carol Bruno, former president of The Mateel Community Center, and former “Reggae on the River”concert promoter, said little else publicly, except to reaffirm her own “positivity”, even though she had just screwed the community center out of about half-a-million dollars. “I’m just staying positive, saying my affirmations and reaffirming my own positivity.” I once heard her say in an interview on KMUD.
Of course, her empire was crumbling beneath her at that time, but still, she expected her positivity to save her. See, she didn’t rip-off the community center, we were just being “negative”. Our protests brought “negativity” to her very positive festival. The lawsuit, bitterly contested, just more negativity, and of course, she only agreed to pay a settlement, so that she could put all of that “negativity” behind her. But this final revolt and overthrow came much too late. For years Carol Bruno dominated SoHum with an iron fist of “positivity”. In a nutshell, here’s how “positivity” works.
You see, you never have a legitimate beef with “Hippie Hitler”. Instead, no matter how you phrase your criticism, you are just venting your “negativity”. “Hippie Hitler” treats “negativity” as a deadly contaminate, not to be tolerated in any dose. “Hippie Hitler” seeks to purify himself of all “negativity”, because only those people who are free of “negativity” deserve the good things in life.
Your tiny little criticism just deeply offends this being of pure “positivity”, and of course they want nothing more to do with a person who’s just so full of “negativity” that they can’t help spilling it all over the place. In this way, “Hippie Hitler’s” incompetence, corruption, and obnoxiousness becomes simply unassailable, while the discussion instead revolves around your “negativity”, and how to deal with the problem of trouble-makers like you.
In some organizations around here not the slightest criticism is tolerated, not even the slightest hint of criticism. If you actually have the nerve to say something critical, however, “Hippie Hitler” will not hesitate to attack you viciously. “Hippie Hitler” will look at you like you just pissed on the new carpet and say something like:
“I couldn’t believe you would say such a thing, in that forum, in that way, or whatever. It really made me wonder what kind of person you are. I’m not sure you’re the kind of person I want to work with.”
This way “Hippie Hitler” can simply banish “negativity”, without ever addressing the criticism.
Then “Hippie Hitler” will tell others in the group: “I really don’t know about that guy, I get a bad feeling about him. I think he’s a troublemaker, and agent provocateur or whatever.” In reality these pillars of “positivity” invariably turn out to be vicious, ruthless people acting out of a totally self-serving agenda.
These “positivity” people, by the way, are also the ones who believe that we are rapidly evolving to a higher plane, where all of the “negativity” will disappear, and we’ll all be beautiful radiant beings of light, inhabiting a higher plane of existence. Does that pile of horseshit sound familiar? In reality, “positivity’ is just another strategy for fucking people over, no “evolutionary awakening” going on there at all.
Pure Horse Shit
You’ll often hear “Hippie Hitler” say, “We have new people here. We don’t want them to get turned off by all of this infighting.” This way, the real issues the group would grapple with, get suppressed so that newcomers can be protected, like innocent children, from the real issues. “Hippie Hitler” treats all newcomers like children, who must be protected from the machinations of “the core group”. So, meetings become boring, ceremonial events that quickly dissolve into parties, and “the core group” becomes increasingly insulated from the membership at large, or the community at large for that matter.
For “Hippie Hitler” its much more important to stifle dissent, establish an insular “core group” and to develop cash flow, than it is to actually accomplish goals or solve problems. “Hippie Hitler” cares more about preserving the group, his position in it, and the cash flow, than about accomplishing goals. This is precisely why most non-profits around here become calcified, stodgy, inaccessible and lame, while you hear nothing but endless praise for the great work they do, whether they do any great work or not.
Here’s how parties play into this strategy. Like I already said, “Hippie Hitler” wants to keep meetings short, and “positive”, and then have them turn into parties. At meetings, and in forums, you usually only find people who genuinely care about an issue. For “Hippie Hitler” these people mean trouble. People who care, want to know what’s going on. They want to know where the money goes. They want to know what “Hippie Hitler” has accomplished. “Hippie Hitler” doesn’t need that “negativity”.
At parties, on the other hand, its all small talk and gossip. At a party, any kind of conflict is in bad taste, but you can easily speak ill, of someone not immediately present. While most hippies have an incredibly low tolerance for conflict, they love gossip and rumor. At a party “Hippie Hitler” can work the room, and his personal agenda, without ever facing a single tough question.
While only people who care, show up at meetings, everyone loves to party, and you can raise money at a party. The parties never stop here in Humboldt Co. between the benefits, boogies, barbeques and festivals, you can always drop some of that liberal guilt for a cause. Just don’t ask any questions, or say anything “negative”, after all, its a party, we’re all just trying to have a good time.
So, you see, parties give “Hippie Hitler” the perfect opportunity to harvest the conscience money, while minimizing his exposure to any “negativity” from anyone who expects to hold them accountable.
This community finally rose up and toppled the Bruno regime, but we still have plenty of “Party and Positivity” fascists in our midst here in Humboldt Co. That is not to say that everyone who works in a non-profit around here is a fascist, it just seems that way sometimes.
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